Barack Obama: President of the Whole Country

He may now have a chance to free himself from his bad habit of straining for comity with crazy people. And more importantly, we may all have a chance to properly marginalize the forces that would rather see a president fail than the country succeed.

For two weeks, Charles P. Pierce is taking a hard-earned and well-deserved vacation. As such, we're re-promoting some of the greatest pieces he's written on President Barack Obama for Esquire over the last several years. We hope that the insights in these classic stories help contextualize other happenings you might find in your daily news feed.​ This afternoon, a look back on an essay published immediately following his second inauguration, acknowledging what Obama had to defeat in his first term with hope for the next four years. —The Editors​​

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Barack Obama begins his second term as president of the United States surrounded by an entertaining universe of prefabricated paranoia. Almost ever since his hand left the Bible the first time, when Chief Justice John Roberts bumbled his way through the ceremony like a new maid dusting the fine crystal for the first time, the irreconcilable political Right hummed and buzzed with warnings about what Obama planned to do if he got reelected. It all fed on itself. For example, the longer he went without proposing any meaningful gun control, the more deeply convinced the gun-giddy conservatives became that it was all a plot to grab their guns in 2014. The more people he killed in drone strikes, the more deeply convinced the wilder neoconservative Right became that it was all an elaborate charade to disguise his ongoing effort to hand over U. S. "sovereignty" to some unholy combination of United Nations bureaucrats and Middle Eastern mullahs. The more he sought to compromise on taxes, and on what have become known as "entitlements," even though most of them are nothing of the sort, the more deeply convinced the supply-side fundamentalists became that, come a second term, the true redistribution of wealth would sweep away economic liberty. In short, the more things that Barack Obama did that angered his liberal base, the more the conservatives convinced themselves that he was setting up an elaborate plot to cater to that same base over his second four years in office.

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For example, on December 3, Sarah Palin, whom the Republicans once wanted to be vice-president, took to the airwaves on Fox News to tell Sean Hannity how truly terrified she was about what might be coming next:

"He believes in socialism, in redistributing wealth, in confiscating hard-earned dollars of our small-businessmen and -women so that they cannot reinvest their dollars and hire more people and grow and expand. Instead he believes in these failed socialist policies. And I say that not to personally condemn our president, but I say it because I face reality, and I see what's going on, and I see the path that we are on and the fact that Barack Obama has not had a budget in the four years that he's been in office and not been worried about it and continues to spend recklessly other people's money. And that is a sign of that idea of loving socialism...."

"What goes beyond socialism, Sean, is communism. And I know, you know, I'm going to get slammed for speaking so bluntly about what's going on here, but that is exactly what is going on."

You couldn't convince an actual liberal of any of this even under slow torture, but the subtext of the entire Republican campaign to unseat the president depended vitally on the subtext that a second term would devolve into Alinsky Unchained. It is entirely possible that the two most disappointed subsets of humanity walking the planet are the people who awoke on December 22 and realized that the Mayans were wrong, and the people who awaken the day after Inauguration Day and discover that they have not been hauled off to a FEMA camp on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. And, in a way, it's hard not to sympathize with them a little. After all, in their own little prefabricated universe, with its own media and its own facts and its own history and its own science, and its own political candidates who subject themselves to all those uniquely designed physical laws, a second term for Barack Obama can lead only to the horrors they have been anticipating for five years. If this universe has a polestar to guide it, it has to be Hale-Bopp.

It must be easier for these people to get a grip on Barack Obama than it is for the rest of us. He is the most singularly elusive politician of our era. Who Richard Nixon actually was disappeared into a wilderness of neuroses, and Ronald Reagan was unknowable. Bill Clinton in so many ways was inexplicable. George W. Bush — and his rise to the presidency, let alone his reelection — was unfathomable. But Barack Obama is there, and then he is not there, and then he is there again on so many fronts that it is almost impossible to get a bead on him long enough to land a solid punch. He is a creature of indirection, and not misdirection. (That would be Nixon again.) He approaches issues and problems from dozens of sidelong ways, very rarely confronting them head-on. He is at the same time nonsubstantial and extraordinarily solid. He has fashioned from himself a political persona quite remarkable, given the political time and place in which he has come to flourish. He is a politician who apparently is completely immune to the effects of empowered nonsense and weaponized ignorance, two effective means of political destruction against which even as gifted a politician as Bill Clinton could not completely protect himself. (Of course, imagining Barack Obama making the same kind of mistake that Clinton ultimately made takes the kind of lurid deductive powers that send you off to Hawaii looking for phony birth certificates.) This is a towering achievement, given the amount of material with which the practitioners of these modern dark arts had to work.

First of all, he's black.

But that was hardly the end of it.

The president defeated attempts to prove he was not born in this country. He beat back attempts to prove that, okay, maybe he was born in this country, but he isn't really an American. He beat back attempts to prove that his policies were three degrees to the left of Trotsky, that he was the friend of and collaborator with domestic terrorists, and that he was somehow complicit — probably by virtue of his middle name — with Islamic extremists overseas. All of that was thrown at him and, for all the effect it had on his chances of reelection, none of it stuck worth a damn.

And he did not defeat it by confronting it, except for that one memorable evening on which he defanged birtherism forever by turning Donald Trump into an object of increased national ridicule. He did not defeat it by overcompensating to prove that he wasn't all those things people were saying he was. He did it by adopting the strategy advocated by Eamon de Valera in the wake of the Easter Rising in 1916 — to defeat the British Empire by ignoring its established institutions.

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And that is how Barack Obama defeated the shadow empire of empowered nonsense and weaponized ignorance. He ignored it. He demonstrated by his actions, including those conciliatory actions that drove his more liberal supporters around the bend, that he would be doing the business of the nation, and that the business of the nation required that he rise above all the foolishness that so many people in Washington take so seriously. This is not to say that he was above politics; his remorseless deconstruction of Willard Romney was proof enough of that, as is the fact that he is quite willing to walk American foreign policy right up to and over the very thin edge of savagery. This is not a man who would have baffled Machiavelli.

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But what he has done is limit the effective power of misdirection and distraction, and he did so through indirection and allusion. None of the empowered nonsense and weaponized ignorance worked because he wasn't in one spot long enough for any of it to hit him, let alone stick to him. He was not Ali in Zaire. He was Ali in 1964, in Miami Beach, hitting Sonny Liston in the head and then disappearing again. He did not practice rope-a-dope politics. He was the butterfly and the bee.

Which does not answer the question of what comes next. Second terms can be historically catastrophic — Watergate, Iran-contra, Lewinsky, Katrina — or they can simply peter out into insignificance. A president has approximately eight months actually to govern before the midterms change the parameters on him again, and then people start running for president again, so that the guy who actually has the job fades offstage. This does not have to be the case with this president. He is not going to hire burglars. He is not going to start slipping into an Alzheimer's fog and start selling missiles to Iran. He is not going to shtup the hired help or wander fecklessly through a storm-drenched moonscape. The natural political entropy that creeps into every second term may envelop him and his administration, but there may be a way to prevent even that. The personal victory he won over most of the things that are cheap and lazy and stupid in our politics has given him the power to disenthrall the public from those same things, and to disenthrall his own administration from its notion that there was some good to be found in the people who so fastened themselves to the cheap and the lazy and the stupid, and that there was some patriotism to be found in the politicians who so profited from them. In his second term, it should be Barack Obama's job to make that personal victory ours as well.

Jeff Christensen/AP Photo

In his impeccable history of the rise of the Tammany Hall political machine, Jerome Mushkat concludes that the Hall's enemies made a capital mistake in attacking it simply as "an immoral gang of corrupt politicos." This was to miss the point, Mushkat argues.

"Tammanyites drew a sharp distinction between principles as universals and tactics as temporary guides.... Thus, the Hall acted on the assumption that politics was the art of the possible. It constantly sought out new issues and utilized them according to their popularity with the voters. Moreover, if it was not identified with a successful issue, it somehow had to adopt that issue.... The public created the issues; the Tammanyites used them. Time and time again, the Hall engineered bewildering policy shifts seemingly without cause. But it did carry an internal consistency in all its gyrations. A good issue brought votes; a bad issue repelled votes.

"It would be a naive oversimplification, however, to suggest that Tammany's political theories and practices worked perfectly. The Hall's major structural weakness was that it could not lead. In frequently yielding to the darker side of human nature in order to gain votes, Tammany was no better or worse than the often irrational characteristics of public opinion. Then, too, the Hall's reliance on popular will ignored [the] capacity for self-delusion and selfishness."

Substitute Grover Norquist for Boss Tweed and you pretty much have the tightly constructed conservative universe right there. It survived for as long as it did because it really did have a nose for the issues that would both stir up the base passions of the electorate and bestir its members to leave their couches and actually get out to vote. And the Democratic party failed to meet that challenge because it too often failed to recognize the power of self-delusion and selfishness. But the forces that are redefining America are having severe gravimetric effects on that universe. It is coming slowly apart. The reelection of Barack Obama was a thunderous moment in what appears to be an irreversible process. The Republicans will leave the old conservative universe, rejoin the reality of what America is becoming, or fade as a political force. They realize at some level that the tectonics beneath them are shifting, or else they wouldn't have been so utterly shocked when Mitt Romney, a man who most of them didn't ever like very much, lost as badly as he did. That is the moment to which Barack Obama ought to rise in his second term. He has the power now to remake American politics because he crushed so many of the old shibboleths and the illusions that necessarily followed from them. He has the power to remake his own presidency by eliminating so many of the cautious assumptions with which he came into office.

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It's not simply that being reelected gives him more latitude with the country and therefore more leverage in Washington — although the way he approached the Republicans during the budget negotiations at the end of the year bespoke a determination on his part not to accept the Republican-manufactured and elite-media-enabled fiction that the "fiscal cliff" was anything more than a clumsy political contrivance and a backdoor way to install an austerity agenda that the country rejected by reelecting him.

It's not simply that being reelected gives him a chance to free himself from his own worst instincts. Let us use, for example, the mistake that was the Simpson-Bowles Commission, which was a perfect illustration of what went wrong with the first Obama administration — the notion that what we needed to solve the economic damage done to the country over the previous decade was a gathering of Wise Men led by a prickish member of the Republican Undead and a charter member of the Democrats for Plutocrats Club. It was another attempt at bipartisanship for its own sake and an attempt at a deal for a deal's sake, and it was shot through with the kind of magical thinking that drove people crazy over the way this president did things. You could see what was coming from a mile away. Even though the commission failed utterly, it was obvious that its Beltway greenroom cred would make "Simpson-Bowles" a fetish object within the political elite. And that is exactly what happened. The "plan" didn't even muster enough votes within the commission to be presented to Congress, but it hung around the president's neck for two years, and became the default "centrist" option for all the austerity cultists.

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He doesn't need to do this any longer. He doesn't have to accept as axiomatic that there are no options except austerity and being called a socialist by the likes of Sarah Palin. He won a campaign by ignoring those kinds of cheap dichotomies and the forces that drive them.

It's not simply that he is in a unique position now to be president of the whole country. (He already started using this by taking to the road to sell his economic proposals shortly before Christmas.) The politics that elected him are the politics of the people outside the Beltway, the ones who waited in line for five hours in places like Cleveland and Fort Lauderdale in order to endorse with their votes the ideas on which he was running. He no longer has to abide by the rules of Beltway politesse or by the parameters set down by an increasingly irrelevant courtier press. It is partly all of those things, but it is something more as well, something more fundamental and sweeping.

It is more that he has a chance to establish what we can call — in the way that fresh approaches always get labeled — a New Realism for the country and its politics, a demand that the empirical take precedence over the theoretical, that a distrust of experience and of expertise is no longer allowed to prevail in the councils of the government, and that the country itself has to accept all this, rather than retreating again into the comfortable fantasies promoted by its favorite TV and radio stars. The self-contained conservative universe began self-destructing by degrees when he was first elected. The process accelerated last November, when all the imagined horrors of that paranoid universe came true and the country — duped by Nate Silver, or sodden with government goodies, or cheated by the hidden hand of the defunct ACORN — reelected the Kenyan Muslim Islamist Socialist Communist Usurper to another term.

By being reelected, he has made an opening. He has made a clearing. He has the ability now to marginalize that which was marginalized for so long, and ought to be again, while at the same time broadening the national dialogue to include ideas that once were quite mainstream — gun control, the necessity of a social safety net, labor rights — but that were shoved to the margins by thirty years of crackpot economics and the existential night sweats of a country grown too timid to uphold those things that made it worthwhile in the first place. That is the challenge of his second term. It is, to borrow a useful verb from a president currently packing them in at your local octoplex, to disenthrall the country, including all of us, and including himself most of all, from the nonsense of the quiet past that is inadequate to the stormy reality. We can think anew. He can act anew. And, by God, he might have a chance to save the country.